The people behind June’s conversation
Our June 2025 Product Conversations webinar brought together Michael Sippey, Adam Fishman, Phil Carter and Ben Lauzier. This feature introduces the backgrounds behind their invitations and the complementary perspectives we wanted to bring to Pinnacle’s audience.
Growth takes different forms across products. We selected this line-up to connect strong product decisions and effective teams with the distinct challenges of subscriptions and marketplaces.
Michael Sippey
Product leader and educator
The experience behind the invitation
Michael Sippey is a product leader and educator whose experience includes building and leading product teams at Medium, Twitter and Six Apart. His teaching connects product strategy with the decisions and execution habits that help teams make progress. That combination made him relevant to practitioners looking to turn product thinking into business impact.
Why we invited Michael
We invited Michael to anchor the conversation in product judgment: choosing worthwhile work, making decisions with imperfect information and connecting execution to a clear purpose. His perspective gave the line-up a foundation beyond individual growth tactics.
How can product managers improve the quality of their decisions while keeping delivery connected to business outcomes?
Adam Fishman
Product growth and leadership expert
The experience behind the invitation
Adam Fishman is a product and growth leader whose background includes leadership roles at Patreon, Imperfect Foods and Lyft. His teaching and writing examine how growth teams are structured, how their capabilities develop and how goals connect to a coherent growth strategy. His work brings organisational choices into the growth conversation.
Why we invited Adam
We invited Adam because sustainable growth depends on the team as well as the experiment. His perspective connected the edition with leadership, goal-setting and the capabilities product managers need to build effective growth practices.
How do you structure a growth team and set goals that support sustainable progress rather than disconnected initiatives?
Phil Carter
Consumer subscription growth expert
The experience behind the invitation
Phil Carter advises consumer subscription companies on growth strategy, growth models and the teams and processes needed to scale. His product background includes work with Quizlet, Faire and Ibotta. His focus on subscription businesses connects product experience with the recurring value customers need to see in order to stay.
Why we invited Phil
We invited Phil to bring subscription-specific thinking to our audience. His perspective helped frame why acquisition, activation, retention and monetisation need to be considered together, with a clear customer value proposition at their centre.
How can a subscription product grow while continuing to earn the customer’s decision to renew?
Ben Lauzier
Marketplace growth expert
The experience behind the invitation
Ben Lauzier specialises in marketplace growth, with product and growth experience at Thumbtack and Lyft. He teaches marketplace practitioners how to think about scaling and marketplace health. His perspective recognises that a platform serves interdependent participants, so growth needs to be assessed through the quality of connections rather than a single headline number.
Why we invited Ben
We invited Ben to show why marketplace growth deserves its own lens. His background made him relevant to questions about supply and demand, matching quality and the measures teams use to judge whether a platform is becoming more useful as it grows.
Which signals show that a marketplace is becoming healthier, rather than simply attracting more participants?
The line-up connected product judgment and team leadership with two important growth models: subscriptions and marketplaces. Together, these perspectives explain why we invited the four speakers to join our community.